


The Five

by Louffox



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Eldritch, Episode: e046 Parade Day, Episode: e047 Company Picnic, Genderfluid Character, Kung Fu, SCIENCE!, The oak doors, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, everything goes to hell, the house that doesn't exist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:07:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Louffox/pseuds/Louffox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos had a team of five talented scientists with him. Strex captured the five. But it wasn't that simple.</p>
<p>This is their story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Oak and Brass

**Author's Note:**

> This will have probably five chapters, and I hope to update every day or every other day. The whole thing is written, so we don't have to worry about my, ahem, tendency to neglect things and not finish them...  
> Anyways, we have the five scientists, in no particular order:  
> Rachelle- forensics, materials, civil engineering  
> Maud- electrical, meteorology, seismology  
> Juyoung- chemistry, biology  
> Dave- biology, botany, language  
> Erich- mathematician, physics  
> They make up Carlos's exclusive, hand-picked team. They each have their own reasons for being selected to come to Night Vale, some reasons we'll explore, some we won't. I'm sticking to the typical Night Vale vague style, so whatever holes you find, fill them with whatever you'd like to imagine.

**Rachelle**

Rachelle carefully plucked first one, then a second thin film from her eye, sighing as she did. She loved wearing contacts- it made her feel more visible, and she wasn’t constantly having to push glasses up the bridge of her nose, and her goggles for over-glasses wear were clunky and awful- but they were going on a field trip, and windy days plus sandy desert made for a bad time with contacts. They were going to investigate one of her favorite wonders of Night Vale. The house that does not exist.

It was an enigma, one of many in the Vale, but one that didn’t make her hands shake with fear or make her stomach turn with revulsion or make her eyes see spots because she was an insignificant, misbegotten creature that was unworthy of comprehending that particular enigma. The latter included the Glow Cloud (all hail), the angels, the dog park, and the thing they agreed was most likely a basilisk that crawled out of Erich’s bag of bagels. Happily, the house that does not exist wasn’t all that scary or grotesque or on a higher plane of existence. It made her think of Alice in Wonderland. When they all parked and she climbed out of her car, she half expected the door to be too tiny to walk through and a bottle labeled _drink me_.

Of course, there were neither of those- there was a well-trimmed garden of pansies and black-eyed susans and carnations and a lawn that was lush but just starting to need a mow, a few windows, and two baby-blue steps up to the front door.

“Behold,” Maud said coyly, pointing in the door. Carlos snorted, but everyone else laughed- it was a bit of a sore spot for him, when he’d found the city beneath the bowling alley was actually a _tiny_ city beneath the bowling alley, he’d been so excited he’d said ‘ _behold_.’

When Rachelle looked where Maud was pointing, she let out a delighted exclamation. It was no longer a composite fiberglass door, but an old looking one, made of oak, and a knob that appeared to be brass. Immediately, she grabbed her kit from the trunk of the car and approached, squinting in the wind.

“Wait, are you sure that’s a good-,” Dave began worriedly, but Maud was already following Rachelle, and Erich, and then the rest, so he trailed off with discontent.

Rachelle didn’t hesitate to approach the door, reaching out with a pair of forceps to scratch a tiny bit of the wood (some sort of old stain, nothing made in the past two decades from the look of it- it was probably full of now-illegal chemicals) into a dish, which she capped.

“Hey, slow down a sec, we haven’t cleared it,” Maud interjected, putting a hand on her shoulder. She jumped, and then backed away.

“Shit, you’re right, sorry,” she said, eyes widening. They laughed and shook their head.

“Eager beaver.” They waved a few different devices around the door, a geiger counter and a few things to check the air quality and pressure, and then poked at it with the ends of a voltmeter, and Rachelle watched their face intently, waiting for some sort of concern or fear to cross their expression.

Finally, they nodded, and waved Juyoung forward. She chewed on her lip as she continued clearing the area, checking the air for any pathogens or chemical agents, and a few quick snap-tests on swabs of the door and knob. She too nodded, looking relieved, and patted Rachelle on the back.

“Got lucky,” she said with a smile.

“You’ve got to be more careful,” Carlos said gently. She noticed he scratched absentmindedly at his side, where she knew the skin was peppered with scars from his own lack of caution.

“Yeah, or you’ll end up like Frankenstein’s monster here. Or like me,” Maud laughed, squatting down to pluck a pansy from the garden and tuck it behind their ear.

Rachelle nodded awkwardly. She never knew how to react to Maud’s situation- with humor, pity, fear, caution, care, curiosity- so she tried not to react to it at all.

“Or you’ll endanger the rest of us. Right, Erich?” Juyoung taunted, grinning brightly at the blonde bespeckled man. He scowled.

“I’ve apologized like a thousand times, give me some slack.”

“Give me my nice desk chair back,” she snorted. She’d had a lovely leather desk chair that she’d really splurged on before going to Night Vale. It had been one of many casualties to the basilisk.

Rachelle let their arguing become pleasant background noise as she resumed studying the door. Beneath the dark stain, she could see some excellent patterning that made her think it was holm oak. Her sample would tell her back in the lab later. She turned her attention to the knob. It was indeed brass, dull and in need of a good polishing. Few hands had touched that knob. The door looked weathered and worn, while the knob looked neglected. Hmm.

Looking around the edges of the doorframe, she found the rest of the house was exactly the same as it had always been. Just the door, then. She took out a camera and took a few snapshots of the paneling on the door. It didn’t look modern, but she wasn’t certain. Front doors weren’t as distinctive about their design as arches and pillars, for instance. She reached for the knob and twisted it curiously.

It turned.

“Guys, it’s not locked,” she said, brushing her hair out of her face impatiently as she turned against the wind.

“It’s open?” Erich said- worried as ever.

“Yeah, I just turned the knob easy as pie. Should I open it?” she asked excitedly.

Carlos looked thoughtful, but they all knew the only way to get to the bottom of it was to open it, so he nodded.

She pushed her glasses up, took a deep breath, and opened it slowly.

“This is it,” Carlos breathed. She didn’t turn to look, but could hear the awe on his face. They all had heard about what Dana had described in the house- the pictures on the walls and the blankness of it all, but Carlos listened to Cecil’s show religiously, and they all knew he relistened to some of them. (He denied anything of the sort, steadily blushing redder and redder when they’d asked.)

“I’m going in,” she announced, determinedly pushing her hair behind her ears.

She stepped in. Her feet didn’t vaporize, the air didn’t change color or choke her, everything stayed stable and pseudo-safe.

Then the door slammed behind her, caught in a gust of wind.

She spun to look at it, but after a moment, Erich opened it, looking inside with worry.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got my cell, I’ll go check it out and text you what’s up. The wind is just gonna slam it anyways,” she said dismissively.

“If you’re sure… Everyone else is setting up things out in the yard. We’ll come in when we’re done,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, smiling to show that she wasn’t scared. He let the door close again and she walked down the first hall, studying the photos with interest.

One hour later, she texted to ask where everyone else was, and why they weren’t coming in. No response, so she continued wandering, taking samples and photos where she could.

Two hours later, she decided to check with the others and approached the door. (The house was much larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside- Erich was going to get migraines from the physics of this.) She opened it-

And slammed it shut again, breathing hard.

That wasn’t the front lawn.

She opened it again slowly, cautiously, peeking around.

Nope, still not the front yard. Unless the yard had turned into an endless, sandy wasteland desert as far as the eye could see. No neighbors. No flower beds or lawn, none of their cars, none of the others at all.

More slowly this time, in a bit of a shocked state, she closed it.


	2. Doubt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if I mentioned before, but we'll revolve through everyone's point of view once, so everyone gets to tell a bit of the story.

Three hours later, her knuckles were bruised from knocking, and she’d had a panicked moment where she’d opened and closed the door rapidly for a few minutes and slammed her finger.

Four hours later her phone battery was nearly dead from calling everyone.

At six hours, when the door finally opened, she was sitting on the floor beside the door, cross legged, trying to do breathing exercises, sweating and hungry and wishing she’d paid more attention to her mother’s brief stint with yoga.

She didn’t swear much, but the curses that flew from her mouth when Erich opened the door and startled her used up her entire week’s worth of profanity, and possibly more- she was likely going to get a ticket for her overage from the SSP on her door tomorrow.

“Rachelle, calm down, it’s only been fourty-five minutes!” he hollered back at her, never one to be calm himself.

“ _Calm do_ -, wait, did you say _fourty-five_ minutes?” she repeated in a mostly normal volume.

“How long has it been for you?” Carlos interrupted before Erich could come up with a smartass response.

“ _Six hours_. I’m starving,” she groaned, pushing past Erich out of the house. Her hands were shaking slightly, and she clenched them at her side.

“Are you sure it’s not just your watch? Time isn’t stable in Night Vale, we all learned that fairly quickly and with certainty,” he asked her cautiously.

“It was definitely at least four hours.”

Dave had looked up when she claimed she was starving. “I made kolaches for everyone, I’ll grab them from the car,” he said helpfully, jogging back to his car. Rachelle sat down heavily on the step, and Juyoung sat beside her.

“Here,” she said, jamming a thermometer unceremoniously in her mouth. Rachelle huffed, but let her take her temperature, prick her finger, take her pulse and blood pressure before she dug into the kolaches.

She _was_ extremely hungry, and nobody had answered their calls or her hammering on the door, so she didn’t feel guilty when she ate all of them.

“What was it like in there?” Maud asked curiously.

“Exactly like Dana described. Empty, with random photos on the walls. A lighthouse, a few mountain photos, some shore somewhere, something that looked like catacombs, some abstract triangle paintings, a tall skyscraper- one of those mirrored ones, with a big yellow triangle at the top- a satellite photo of a sandstorm, and an endless desert- and oh my god. When I opened the door… Holy heck,” she sighed, shaking her head.

“What? You could open the door? It must not have opened to here,” David said.

“That’s not-,” Erich began, but Maud and Juyoung parroted him and finished his sentence with him.

“-physically possible.” He glared at the two of them.

“Honestly, we’re beyond the point of what’s physically possible and what’s not. We’ve been here for nearly two years, we’ve all had to edit our ideas of reality in order to keep our sanity in this place. But it’s scientifically amazing,” Carlos added.

“And impossible,” Erich huffed.

“Oh, and the house is bigger on the inside than it can possibly be from the outside dimensions. Just another thing for you,” Rachelle put in helpfully. He groaned. “So when I opened the door, it didn’t open here, obviously. It opened to a vast, endless desert. I think it was the one Dana talked about.”

“Did you go through?” Juyoung asked.

“No way. She’s trapped dimension- and time-hopping, I’ll pass on that, thanks. My cats would miss me if I took off and I would lose all my followers on my fitness blog,” she snorted.

“I’m going to call Cecil about this,” Carlos announced.

They all catcalled and oohed and ahhed in unison, and he blushed, turning away to take the call at a short distance so they could continue talking.

“I’m not going back in there for a while, so if anyone else wants to go, be my guest,” she said firmly.

“I’m thinking the boss-man perfect-hair science-king wants to go next. What’s 360 divided by 45?” Maud asked the group in general.

“Eight,” Erich said quickly.

“Exactly eight?” Maud repeated, impressed.

“Yes, exactly eight, or I would’ve said decimals,” Erich said, rolling his eyes.

“Whatever, smartypants. Okay, so that means that every eight minutes in the house is one minute here. So we should time it, time how long Carlos wants to be there, and open the door for him when he’s ready.”

“What’s this thing about a parade?” Juyoung asked suddenly, looking down at her phone. It was open to Facebook.

“What?” Rachelle asked, leaning over to look. She loved parades.

“Cecil sent an invite to a parade today. Looks like he invited most of the town. It’s at… huh. The location is in morse code,” she said slowly, frowning.

“I expect that’s part of being a Night Vale native, learning morse code in elementary school. Along with automatic weapons training and spelling,” Dave laughed. “Give it here.”

She passed him her phone and he studied it for a second, and then blinked, looking decidedly concerned.

“It says its at Radon Canyon at Strex HQ.”

**Dave**

Dave was a little irritated at Rachelle eating all the kolaches- he’d made one for everyone, even made each with everyone’s favorite fruit filling- but he had to agree with her when she slapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes went wide.

“Oh god, is he really doing it?” Juyoung asked in a shocked, hushed voice.

Dave knew four languages fluently, and six more he knew enough to get by with, and he understood all sorts of ciphers and codes, but couldn’t think of a word to express how much of a bad idea he thought Cecil’s plan was.

The word ‘parade’ used to be for when armies would march through a town and expect reverence. Had Cecil raised an army?

“Should we ask Carlos if he knows anything about this?” he asked in a whisper.

“Yeah. I mean, probably. He must know what’s going on. I mean, he lives with the guy,” Rachelle reasoned.

“Then why is he here, looking at a door, while his boyfriend is fighting a rebellion?” Maud pointed out.

They all mulled that over for a long moment.

“We need to hear what’s happening on the radio. Like, now,” Erich said urgently, digging his mp3 player out of his pocket. He scowled at the headphones, struggling to untangle them.

“Alright, I want to go in next. We need to calculate-,”

“It’s 8 minutes in for every 1 minute out. What’s going on with this ‘parade’ thing?” Maud said bluntly. He merely blinked at her.

Carlos had a deliberate way of speaking. Everything was carefully enunciated, and he chose great words to get his point across. Dave hadn’t been surprised when he’d confessed he was dating the smooth, sonorous, waxing-poetic baritone on the radio. Though he was a scientist and his ways were in math and numbers and logic, he had a writer’s soul in him, and it had either consciously or subconsciously been attracted to Cecil’s own way with words from the very start.

However, this deliberate manner of speaking made him an excellent liar. There was no room for error or ever any stumbling or anything in his words. He spoke carefully, so speaking with perfect enunciation wasn’t a tell, because he always talked like that. And because he was so slow and careful with his words, he had time to analyze his own speaking and remove anything that could be tells before it even happened. Dave had a deep admiration for his way of speaking. It also frustrated him at times like this, when he really needed to know the truth, and Carlos could easily be lying.

“Parade thing? What parade thing?” he repeated, not a tell or twitch or overly stiff feature on his face. Dave passed him the phone wordlessly, and Carlos read it, brow furrowing. His brow always furrowed a little when he was reading.

“And the morse code at the location says it’s at Radon Canyon,” Juyoung said.

“You know what else is at Radon Canyon?” Maud said accusingly.

“Strex headquarters,” Carlos breathed, blinking carefully. “And I am to understand that it isn’t a parade after all- but an attack on Strex?” He glanced at the phone again. “He put this on Facebook? Oh, Cecil, geez… he’s never been one for subtlety, I suppose, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Has anyone been listening to the broadcast?”

“I’ve got it recording back at the lab,” Dave said helpfully. “I like the weather.”

“Alright. Well- hmm. I suppose, since we’re all set up, I could take a short journey inside and get what I need. It’ll only take a short time here. And Cecil sounded fine on the phone. I’m just going to go in quickly. I suppose it helps that time inside is longer than it is outside- that is, if ‘time’ existed properly- so I can go in for an hour, and it’ll be only a short while here.”

“Seven point five minutes,” Erich said.

“Right. Okay, so in seven point five minutes, open the door. Then we’ll pack up and head back and listen to what’s going on with this parade,” he decided.

Dave felt an unease deep in his stomach. His mother had always said to trust his gut, and trust it he had. So now, with the worried churning, he was having a hard time trusting Carlos and not his stomach.

Carlos quickly gathered up a few things. He kept dashing back to the car to get something else, or to trade things out, but finally was ready to go. Erich had a stopwatch, and they stood around the door like an escort.

“Right then. I’ll see you in an hour,” Carlos said brightly, and he stepped through.

The door closed, and Dave’s guts insisted something was awry.

 

 


	3. Spiraling

**Erich**

Being in Night Vale hadn’t exactly been the dream he’d dreamed up, but it was interesting, and it was better than teaching or doing whatever else he would’ve been stuck doing. Okay, so the basilisk mess had been just that- a _mess_ \- but it could’ve happened to anyone. He’d cleared out all his wheat and wheat by-products from the lab, just like everyone else. And forgotten just one bag of bagels.

It didn’t help that they generally shared food, and both Juyoung and Dave _loved_ cinnamon raisin bagels, and this wasn’t the first time he’d hoarded something and kept it secret so he didn’t have to share.

He firmly maintained that he’d thought they were gluten free, and had the sense that nobody believed him, but didn’t back down.

But he still swore when, almost immediately after Carlos shut the door and vanished inside, his stopwatch bled gray gunk all over his hand, sprouted eight spindly legs, and made a getaway.

“Oh shit, now what?” Maud cried, scowling at him.

“This isn’t my fault, it just grew eight legs! Don’t tell me you’ve never had this happen to you, because by now, it’s happened to everyone,” he shouted right back.

“No, it hasn’t!” He opened his mouth to argue, but they grudgingly added, “They usually only grow six legs.”

“Well, what now?”

“You’re a mathematician, right? Just count to sixty, and do it seven and a half times,” they said coyly.

“You’re joking.”

“Or just estimate when about seven minutes are up, that shouldn’t be too hard. We’re going to start packing, though.”

“I can estimate time while packing,” he snorted, walking past her. He luckily hadn’t had much to dig out, so he packed quickly and then went questing after his runaway timer. He kept reminding himself about how much time he guessed had passed as he poked through the flowers and shrubs.

He found it and grabbed it with a triumphant ‘Ha!’, which then turned to a yelp of pain when it bit him, forcing him to drop it again. But he got the last word- he stomped down on it and crushed the little brute. Bummer about the stopwatch, but if it was going to be an ass, he had no regrets.

“Hey guys, you won’t believe what my stopwatch just did,” he called around the corner as he rounded the house to the front yard. “Anyone got a band-aid?”

A knife was pointed at his face and he threw his hands in the air automatically. Maybe the band-aid could wait. That blade was long and shiny and was a little higher priority than finding a band-aid.

**Juyoung**

She saw the cars suddenly blocking the street, screeching in like banshees, overly hard on the gas and on the brake. It struck her as uncivilized and unnecessary, and then it struck her what was happening.

Black cars driving recklessly and stopping where they were stopped.

Aside from being a well-learned chemist and fairly decent biologist, she’d been chosen for the team because of... well, it was a bit of a cliche. Tall asian woman, knowing martial arts.

When she was a child and her father began teaching her kung-fu, she thought it was neat, she didn’t realize exactly how useful it would become. Specifically, it was northern shaolin kung fu, with lots of rapid jabs and whirling blocks. It was actually a bit prideful of him to teach her at such a young age (she’d landed herself in the principals office in in elementary school several times for showing off what she’d learned and hurting people) but she eventually became grateful for the skills.

It did ruin every fighting movie ever (except Fight Club, but that didn’t even attempt to use martial arts, so it was okay) and make her a bit of a cocky snob, but thanks to what she could do and had done, people generally didn’t say that to her face.

So she immediately took cover when the cars came rushing in, dodging back behind the house. She heard a brief scuffle and thanked god, or the strange idols her father bowed to, or the void, or whatever, that guns were nothing but blunt tools in Night Vale. (We’re all immune to bullets and it’s a miracle.) She couldn’t fight a bullet. But she could fight these wackadoos.

The first came around the corner and hit the ground face-first almost immediately. Men might be bigger, but that just meant that they hit the ground harder. They hit the ground easier, too, thanks to a high center of gravity.

Despite being in Night Vale and having nobody to train with (she’d trained once with a generalized martial arts group in town and vowed to never speak of it again and to never go back) she’d not lost her skill.

Next came two, and she brought them down with a series of kicks and hand strikes. As long as she could keep them a short distance away, she could do this. She’d never been great at close range fighting, and the northern shaolin style favored keeping a good sized gap between herself and her opponent, for her to quickly close the distance, strike, then retreat before a return blow could come. It was a bit like fencing, but with her hands.

She heard a crash from the front of the house and assumed Maud was holding their own. Silently, she cursed herself for not expecting this. Carlos had put some strange things in his pockets as he was deliberating over what to bring with him into the house, he probably knew exactly what was going on- why hadn’t he told them?

She dodged the next knife-wielding Strex employee and took out his companion, took a hard punch to a forearm block, thanked whatever gods or void that he wasn’t holding a knife in that hand, and brought both of them down. She was starting to breathe heavily, and knew that they were going to send a large group in a second. Unless they were out of people!

She gritted her teeth when she heard more cars arrive.

So why had Carlos not told them? Why- oh. He was trying to protect them. He _thought_ he was protecting them. If they didn’t know anything, they would be innocent. He knew something was up.

How much did he know? Did he help Cecil plan the whole thing?

_Oh, Carlos, Cecil, what have you guys gotten into?_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got another fic I've just come off hiatus and have resumed- a Victorian AU, if anyone is interested in more reading material. Shamelessly promoting, I know. But I'm having good fun with it and updating it about once a week.
> 
> WHO'S TERRIFIED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE I can't decide what'll be worse- more Kevin and no mention of Cecil, or Cecil returning but all broken and Strexified. I AM ENCHANTED AND TERRIFIED.


End file.
